Overview

Overview

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Summary of the work

IAS currently has 15 .Net applications services supporting Assurance, Safety and HR. To maintain these applications at 3rd line, IAS requires a .Net development service to undertake bug fixes, minor changes and upgrades. Without which the applications would not be able to support the users' requirements.

Latest start date

Monday 30 October 2017

Expected contract length

Contract will end 31 March 2019

Location

South East England

Organisation the work is for

ARMY HQ, ANDOVER, HAMPSHIRE

Budget range

About the work

About the work

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Why the work is being done

Information Applications Services (IAS) utilises DevOps to deliver applications through a full automated delivery pipeline on to the production environment, the Army Hosting Environment and in particular the Oracle Consolidated Platform.IAS also requires the ability to use .Net service to deliver new requirements/products. The supplier needs to be able to provide development teams to delivery Army/Defence requirements using agile (SCRUM) in a DevOps environment.There may be a need to provide a senior developer to provide the technical assurance and guidance to the development teams.

Problem to be solved

Provision of a cost effective, flexible .Net development service that can meet the demands of IAS's requirements to support and maintain the current applications services and also provide a development service for new requirements.

Who the users are and what they need to do

The users of the Applications are regulars, reserves, civil servants and contractors across the Army and wider Defence. The users are required to log on to the Defence Information Infrastructure and browse to the appropriate url. Access is granted via single sign on.The users need secure, highly performant and available application services to provide information in the right context to undertake their business functions to enable the day to day operation of the British Army and wider Defence.

Early market engagement

Any work that’s already been done

Existing team

The current In Service Management .Net Development team consists of developers who provide between 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday excluding public holidays.There is one product team at present in IAS utilising with 2 developers in the team.

Current phase

Live

Work setup

Work setup

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Address where the work will take place

Army Headquarters is located on the outskirts of Andover, Hampshire, SP11 8HJ

Working arrangements

The Authority expects the resources to work in Army HQ Andover with occasional visits in the UK (south). Remote working is permitted by exception, subject to security constraints and the need to access stakeholders and MoD systems.IAS uses Azure to provide a remote development capability enabling the development service to work with customers and off-site. Once the code is ready for deployment it is brought into IAS on premise cloud dev/test environment, to be deployed through the DevOps pipeline onto the AHE via System Integration, security testing and pre-production. Each with testing against the capability

Security clearance

Security Clearance (SC) will be required for the duration of the role. Incumbents are to follow both the letter and spirit of Army Headquarters security regulations

Recent demonstrable experience of user centric development using agile stories and tasks

Delivery of development services into an Agile /DevOps organisation. Working within SCRUM/Kanban frameworks within multi-skilled development teams; providing poly skilled individuals capable of contributing to the team beyond development

JavaScript ES2015 and TypeScript together with bundling tools such as WebPack

Have demonstrable recent experience of working in Continuous Delivery environments consisting and maintain the CI pipeline of JetBrains TeamCity 9.x. Git, Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Release Manager

Recent experience of developing and supporting the release of .Net application and upgrades through the DevOps pipeline onto production via Release Manager.

Nice-to-have skills and experience

Experience of working within GDS standards.

How suppliers will be evaluated

How suppliers will be evaluated

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How many suppliers to evaluate

3

Proposal criteria

Evidence against the skills, experience and cultural fit.

Approach for transition of service, running and knowledge transfer.

Provide CVs and relevant experience of senior developer/developers who could be part of the service.

Provide two reference able client-focused case studies where your company have provided the desired service capability.

Ability to mobilise the team quickly and approach to service continuity.

Explain how you plan to retain key resources for the duration of the contract and how you can commit to meet IAS’s continuous need for developers.

Ability to flex up and down resources, whilst ensuring quality and consistency

Approach and methodology to meeting the requirements outlined in RFP

Give examples of KPIs and SLAs that you would be prepared to commit to for this contract.

Identification of the risks and dependencies associated with this requirement and potential mitigation.

Provided an exit plan for the transition to an alternative supplier at the end of the contract and enabled the transition.

How the proposal will optimise costs, and generate savings. In particular minimising transition costs between the current team and the new supplier.

Cultural fit criteria

Recent proven experience in working with the product owner to derive

Recent proven experience of an open and collaborative working relationship at levels with excellent communication and co-ordination skills when conducting daily stand-ups, team meetings, presentation and demonstrations

Has a no-blame culture and encourages people to learn from their mistakes, working as "one team"

Suppliers must demonstrate an ability and willingness to work collaboratively within a multi-vendor delivery environment

IAS would be willing to accept a substitute, have limited supervision in terms of requesting outcomes and no mutuality of obligation to the supplier. Our behaviour and working practices are designed to be in keeping with a service provision.

2.
Is there a current incumbent?

There is currently one .Net developer incumbent responsible for supporting live .Net application services.

3.
Please could the Authority confirm if the provided service team would need to be based on-site at Army HQ (Andover) or would a remote development team be acceptable e.g. based in the South at a List X facility with an RLI link - but with sprint planning and reviews taking place at Andover?

Suppliers' should note the wording for "Working arrangements" within the advert. But off-site working in a List X facility would be acceptable as long as the culture and ethos behind agile is not impacted. IAS would expect the development teams to work very closely with the product owners on a very regular basis who are on-site. IAS would also expect development and test to work side by side, this may not be possible if working off-site in a list X facility.

4.
Is a full-time service required (with a minimum number of full-time developers/testers) or will the service be managed as a call-off arrangement?

IAS expects there to be enough work to maintain 1 developer full time to support live applications. Dependent on the demand this requirement needs to be scaleable to meet a call-off against an SLA to supply developers for additional work. The additional work could be supporting migrations, major changes to live applications and providing developers for a new product team.

5.
Please can you provide answers to the below questions:1) Average number of support call received monthly2) Category/type of calls, with effort required3) Will all documentation/source code be provided for all current 15 applications4) What is the current technology stack for all 15 applications5) Are any 3rd party applications used

1) Average number of incidents per month is 0.73 per application, the majority of which are low2) The majority of incidents are low, minor bugs that do not impact on the functioning of the application3) All source code is in Git on prem. Documentation is limited but all code is commented and written to be self-documenting4) The technology stack is SQL 2014, ASP .Net, MVC, webforms, React/Redux5) IAS have a number of COTS products used - further expansion of the question is required for a fuller answer

6.
Please can you provide answers to the below questions (continued):6) What are the current SLA's in place

6) The SLAs are different according to the level of Service being offered. IAS provides Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze with different resolution and change timings. Given lack of resource, SLAs for anything other than a denial of service are at reasonable endeavours

7.
Thank you for the previous answers. Regarding question No 5 asking whether any 3rd party apps were used, we would like to expand the question into the following:5a) Number of 3rd party apps utilised (May we ask for list of 3rd party apps utilised?)5b) What are the licensing agreements for any of the 3rd party apps?5c) Do you have any support agreements with the companies that produced these 3rd party apps?5d) Are any of these apps used to support the applications?

This DOS requirement is for .Net dev resource to support in house developed applications and use to populate product teams. IAS does have COTS products which support the Army and elements of Defence, licenced with support agreements. All 3rd party applications used in the development of .Net applications such as visual studio, GIT, TFS, Sonar Cube are licenced and supported.

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